Dirty Deeds in the White House

Am I the only one wondering about the timing of this Justice Department Investigation into the blowing of Valerie Plame's cover? Let's recap, shall we? The Novak column ran in mid July. Within the last week or so we have found out that George Tenet wrote a letter to the Justice Department requesting an investigation by the end of July. And then, for seven or eight weeks, nothing happens. Now, all of a sudden, the letter becomes public and we are told that the investigation will begin immediately. Hmmmm. Why, now, after all these weeks, the sense of urgency? What's happened in the meantime? Perhaps time to destroy the evidence? Time to identify, isolate, and/or neutralize the leakers?

Think about it. You're George Bush, or any executive, and there are allegations that one or more of your senior staff members has engaged in serious wrongdoing. Does any believe that even the most incompetent executive would do nothing for all these weeks in that situation? If you are that executive and you are personally innocent of any wrongdoing and you have any scruples, you will launch an investigation immediately. You want to find out what happened and if there really was serious wrongdoing you are going to want to purge the evildoers. And you are going to do this publicly, to limit the damage to the reputations of yourself and the other scrupulous people working for you. Anybody around here remember any such thing happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the last month and a half?

If you are that executive and you have no scruples, you are still going to want to know what happened, but you're going to do it on the QT, and once you have gotten to the bottom of it and shredded some documents and erased some tapes and gotten things pretty well cleaned up, you will have your own people conduct an investigation, and you will cast the net as broadly as possible (say, 2000 executive branch employees), so that an investigation that lasts past the next presidential election will be plausible (despite the fact that the leakers have been identified as "senior officials," a much smaller group).

Does anybody out there believe the the crew that doesn't want us to know of Saudi Arabia's involvement in 9/11 is going to want us to know of there own involvement in this sordid affair?